Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni chapter 4

Chapter 4: Time Wasting (episode 14-15)

My exams are finally over and I am free to celebrate the holidays! So, to give myself some holiday cheer I decided none other than to watch this show! (I know that doesn’t make sense logically) After the last chapter, which is considered long, this one is actually extremely short being only the length of two episodes. Thinking back on them they weren’t that important and I don’t think it would make that much of a difference if you were to just skip them. Though, I guess there was one part in this that would probably count as crucial information.

Anyway, this time the chapter focuses on the girl with the freak bangs (aka Rika). Though, it is set before any of the Oyashiro curses actually happened, so Rika is a lot younger and looks absolutely adorable throughout the whole thing. A completely new character, who is a police officer comes from the city pretending to be a tourist to check everything that has been going on about the dam project that has threatened to destroy a small town in the country. Assuming that no one knows he is undercover, it comes as a great surprise that after meeting a young girl many things become out of order for him and his undercover job becomes the least of his worries.

This chapter was lacking in a lot of things that I have come to gotten to use to. In fact, this chapter didn’t even involve Keiichi at all! Our supposed main character wasn’t even in it. Also, unlike the other chapter’s endings where it had one big and suspenseful ending, this one didn’t seem to have much of that at all. Though, as much as this may give off the appearance that this was a boring chapter, for some odd reason I don’t really think that it was. It was still entertaining in an odd sort of way. I guess it is just that it was a change from what I usually see so everything came as a surprise in a no surprise sort of way (does that sentence even make sense?). As much as this one still was entertaining, it really was not nearly as good as the other chapters that I have seen so far. I also got confused by the last ten minutes, I am not sure whether I just wasn’t paying close attention enough, but it didn’t make that much sense and there wasn’t even a cliffhanger, which would lead you to expect that it would probably be simple! Or maybe…I should just watch it again? Anyway, I also don’t really understand the chapter title “Time Wasting”, is that what the creators were hoping to make out of this chapter the whole time?

So, this is supposedly meant to be the end of the “question” chapter, in all this chapter wasn’t as good as the others, but Rika was really cute so it just made this seem a lot better. I am now very excited because I am going to be starting the “answer” chapters, which will hopefully clarify a lot of questions I have, but my expectation in receiving answers are actually pretty low. Well, I guess I hate to see to believe! ^_^